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Message concatenation

An SMS has a limited length. A longer text is split into several parts that the recipient's phone joins back into one message. Each part, however, is charged as a separate SMS.

How many characters fit into a message

number of parts	standard SMS	Unicode
1	up to 160 characters	up to 70 characters
2	up to 306 characters (2 × 153)	up to 134 characters (2 × 67)
3	up to 459 characters (3 × 153)	up to 201 characters (3 × 67)
4	up to 612 characters (4 × 153)	up to 268 characters (4 × 67)
5	up to 765 characters (5 × 153)	up to 335 characters (5 × 67)

As soon as the text exceeds the length of one SMS, the capacity of each part drops from 160 to 153 characters (in Unicode from 70 to 67). The rest is taken by a header the phone uses to put the parts back together. A message of 161 characters is therefore not "160 + 1", but two parts of 153.

Important

A message of 180 characters is shown to the recipient as one, but you pay for it as 2 SMS. You will find the price of one SMS in the price list.

Characters that count twice

In a standard SMS these characters take up two places: € ^ { } [ ] ~ \ |. The text 100€ therefore has 5 characters, not 4. In Unicode they count once. A line break is one character.

When a message is sent in Unicode

A standard SMS supports only the characters of the GSM 7-bit set: the basic Latin alphabet, digits, common punctuation and some accented characters such as é, ä, ö or ü. Characters like á, č, ř, ž or ů are not part of it.

The full set looks like this — the column is the high half of the character code, the row the low half (SP is a space, LF a line break, CR a carriage return, ESC the switch to the extended set):

	0x	1x	2x	3x	4x	5x	6x	7x
x0	`@`	`Δ`	SP	`0`	`¡`	`P`	`¿`	`p`
x1	`£`	`_`	`!`	`1`	`A`	`Q`	`a`	`q`
x2	`$`	`Φ`	`"`	`2`	`B`	`R`	`b`	`r`
x3	`¥`	`Γ`	`#`	`3`	`C`	`S`	`c`	`s`
x4	`è`	`Λ`	`¤`	`4`	`D`	`T`	`d`	`t`
x5	`é`	`Ω`	`%`	`5`	`E`	`U`	`e`	`u`
x6	`ù`	`Π`	`&`	`6`	`F`	`V`	`f`	`v`
x7	`ì`	`Ψ`	`'`	`7`	`G`	`W`	`g`	`w`
x8	`ò`	`Σ`	`(`	`8`	`H`	`X`	`h`	`x`
x9	`Ç`	`Θ`	`)`	`9`	`I`	`Y`	`i`	`y`
xA	LF	`Ξ`	`*`	`:`	`J`	`Z`	`j`	`z`
xB	`Ø`	ESC	`+`	`;`	`K`	`Ä`	`k`	`ä`
xC	`ø`	`Æ`	`,`	`<`	`L`	`Ö`	`l`	`ö`
xD	CR	`æ`	`-`	`=`	`M`	`Ñ`	`m`	`ñ`
xE	`Å`	`ß`	`.`	`>`	`N`	`Ü`	`n`	`ü`
xF	`å`	`É`	`/`	`?`	`O`	`§`	`o`	`à`

On top of that, ESC adds the extended set: ^ { } \ [ ~ ] \| €. These characters take up two places.

Everything else — accented characters beyond the table, emoji, Cyrillic, typographic quotes " " or the em dash — — is outside the set and switches the message to Unicode.

With Unicode enabled, the message is sent in Unicode only when the text actually contains a character outside GSM. A text without such characters is sent as a standard SMS with the 160-character limit.
Without Unicode, characters outside GSM are replaced and emoji are removed.

What the campaign warns you about

When checking an SMS campaign, the portal warns you when:

the text exceeds a part boundary by at most 15 characters — a small cut saves a whole SMS. If only 1–3 characters force Unicode, it points them out too; replacing them gets you back to the longer limit;
characters outside GSM would be replaced or emoji removed because Unicode is not enabled;
the message has more than 5 parts.

Message shortener

When you use the message shortener in a campaign, the text is shortened and completed with a link so that the whole message fits into one SMS.

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